How to Transfer a WordPress Site from a Development Server To a Live Server – Part 2 – Install Backup Buddy

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This is the second part of How to Transfer a WordPress Site from a Development Server To a Live Server tutorial series. In this session we show how to install and activate BackupBuddy for your WordPress Site. We also discuss the different parts of this tool and how to use it properly.

Video Transcript

So that’s what we’re going to do next and we’re going to start off by installing and activating Backup Buddy.

Now, come December 26th, Backup Buddy is running a special where if you’re watching this and you don’t already own Backup Buddy, this will be great way to… well, let’s see… let’s get here. This will be a great way to purchase it. If you come over to my blog… now, this webinar is not intended as an advertisement so I’m going to say this once. But if you come over to my blog and use the Backup Buddy banner down here to access the site, you can use a coupon code that is essentially an all caps BACKUP2011. That coupon code will give you 30% off of the purchase of Plugin Buddy or Backup Buddy. And so it’s definitely worth looking at. I’ll post that coupon code. The coupon code is inactive right now. It’s not going to be active until the 26th and it’ll be active through the 31st. I’ll post that with the videos here. So if you want to take advantage of that later, that’s… I mean, that’s a good cost savings. I think you can get unlimited access to the sites or unlimited number of site for Plugin Buddy for $150 and using the coupon code, it takes it down to $100. So that’s a pretty good price savings for this plugin.

Okay so the next thing we’re going to do is we’re just going to go ahead and install Backup Buddy here and I’ll kind of walk you through the plugin a little bit once we do that. But we’ll say new… well, let’s just go the dashboard. We’re in WordPress 3.3 for what that’s worth and we’ll come down to plugins and we’ll say Add New. And I already have a copy of it so I’m just going to upload it here from My Computer, choose the file and let’s see, Backup Buddy zip. We’ll install it and activate it here. Okay then activate the plugin. This stuff’s all pretty simple and straightforward except that we want to go ahead and get the license thing set up. They’ve got their own licensing system here so we’re going to generate a license key. It’s now licensed and…

Okay so we’ve applied the license to it and it’s verified that we’ve got the latest version of Plugin Buddy which is 2.2.33 and the license is attached to the site. And so now we just come over to Backup Buddy. And I’ll give you a real brief summary of what can happen here.

Somebody asks, “Is there a difference between Plugin Buddy and Backup Buddy?” The answer is Plugin Buddy is sort of the brand name. Plugin Buddy covers all of the plugins that they offer and there’s a whole bunch of different plugins that are part of their Plugin Buddy package. Backup Buddy is just one of the plugins that’s inside of that. I mean, it’s sort of the most well-known and most important plugin that they have but they do have a bunch of other plugins that have… that I pay for and then I have a grand intention to use but I just haven’t gotten around to yet.

But in any case, this does a couple of things. One is it’s got this little server info section where you can test your server first before you do anything just to make sure that all of your settings are set up the way they need to be set up in order for Backup Buddy to work properly. And so that’s a pretty useful tool because essentially, it’s going to tell you whether or not you’ve got errors that may prevent Backup Buddy from working.

And then you can also schedule Backup Buddy to act so you can schedule either do database backups or full backups. You can give it its intervals. You can tell it when it should run and then you can set up remote destinations for it to be sent to. So for example, you can send your backups to your Amazon S3 account, to a Dropbox account, to your… if you’ve got a cloud files account. You could also essentially ftp it to you know, some place else on your site or you can… if it’s small enough, you can have it emailed to you. You know, the backup… I did this backup last week when I did a live upgrade of BYOB Website to WordPress 3.3 and you know that backup was like… I think it was 1.6 Gigabytes. There’s no way of course, you’re going to email that to anybody. So if you were going to have something automatically happen to it besides just letting it reside on your site you know, you would use… well, you wouldn’t use… well, you could use a Dropbox or your Amazon S3 or something like that. Anyway, you can configure that that way.

There is a setting section here for email notifications and you can choose to use a password for things like Import Buddy and Pair Buddy. And you can email yourself backup reminders and you can have it select you know, different error logs to maintain for you. I mean, there’s all kinds of stuff that youc an set up here and maye the most important part, the most important thing to consider when you’re doing this is the backup exclusions.

Now, I think if we go… I mean, just for grins, we’re just going to look at the one that’s set up on my site here. This is the BYOB Website and if we look at the settings I have set up on this site, you can see that under exclusions, because this is in… because BYOB Website is actually in the root directory of my domain and because Backup Buddy will backup everything that is inside of the root directory of that website. All of my subdirectories, all of my subdomains happen to also you know, have their folders inside the root directory of my website. And so what would happen is if I didn’t use any backup exclusions, what would happen is Backup Buddy would attempt to or would actually succeed at backing up all of the different subdomains that are active inside of this hosting account which would be a huge, huge backup. So what I did was I used this exclusions tool to remove all of the different subdomains from my main backup of this site when I backed up BYOB Website.

Well, over here, you can see I’ve only got these folders showing up in here because this is… because this website is its own subdirectory and so there’s no other subdirectories… the only subdirectories inside of that subdirectory are these ones over here. There’s no reason to exclude any of these except I suppose, we could exclude cgi bin because it’s not really necessary for a WordPress site. But otherwise, setting up a backup exclusion is important if what you’re backing up is your site, your main site in your main directory. But if it’s a development site in a development subdirectory like this is then it’s no big deal.

And then… and so somebody asked about free backup plugin, Easy Peasy. We’ll talk about other options later in terms of using these for backups. The thing that’s different between what I’m doing right now and a standard backup is when I’m really doing is I’m transferring a site. I happen to be backing the site up as well but that’s not really the point of this. The point of this really is that I’m giong to transfer it from one domain name and server system to another and that’s what makes this a little bit more complicated than a simple backup which is what something like Easy Peasy will handle. There are other kinds of cloning software that will do this as well because essentially, what we’re doing is creating a clone. But nevertheless, we’ll talk about that as we work our way through this.

Okay anyway, and then one other thing that this can do is this can do a malware scan of your site. And so if you have concerns about your site getting hacked or perhaps having bad bits of code on it, this malware scan actually I think is quite nice. And so anyway, that’s also there. But we’re going to focus on backup and restore.